Frigid cells, no access to medical care, and invasive cavity searches.
These are just some of the conditions described in a 92-page Human Rights Watch report that focused on the Krome detention center in Miami-Dade, the Broward Transitional Center, and the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami.
The report was jointly released Monday by Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice and Sanctuary of the South. It found the people locked up in the three South Florida immigration centers are living under "abusive, degrading, and in some cases life-threatening" detention.
“People in immigration detention are being treated as less than human,” said Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement. “These are not isolated incidents, but rather the result of a fundamentally broken detention system that is rife with serious abuses.”
READ MORE: Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz finds 'incredibly disturbing' conditions at Krome
The groups documented the experiences of 17 immigrants detained at the facilities in the last six months.
They described sleeping on concrete floors in overcrowded Krome. At Federal Detention Center, two people said they were forced to eat a meal using only their mouths — with their hands tied behind their backs.
Said Katie Blankenship, immigration attorney and co-founder of Sanctuary of the South: “The rapid, chaotic, and cruel approach to arresting and locking people up is literally deadly and causing a human rights crisis that will plague this state and the entire country for years to come.”
“Mothers, fathers, siblings, children, and close friends of US citizens are being taken from their homes and communities and disappeared into a detention system that is deeply harmful and dehumanizing,” said Denise Noonan Slavin, senior advisor to the executive director at Americans for Immigrant Justice, in a statement. “Allowing these injustices to continue is both degrading and deeply contrary to the core values that the United States upholds.”
The newly opened immigration detention center in the Everglades — the one state officials call Alligator Alcatraz — was not investigated by the rights groups. It just opened this month.
The rights groups called on the Trump Administration to increase oversight and use detention only as a last resort.
WLRN reached out to U.S. immigration officials for comment but did not receive an immediate response.
In defending U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, White House border czar Tom Homan told CNN last week that the agency "has the highest detention standards in the industry.”
Republican U.S. Rep. Carlos Giménez, of Miami, who recently toured inside the Federal Detention Center, said he found conditions there adequate and “not inhumane.”
“There was nothing there that I saw that would cause me any kind of concern," said Giménez, R-Miami.
Giménez said he was told that about 300 immigrants were being housed in the prison and that it was “well within” capacity, and that detainees had access to doctors, dentists and other health professionals.
